Fifty-One
Tom joined Hammerton while Stella ran the online search, Carrington beside her.
“How are you holding up?” Tom said.
Hammerton shrugged the question off and said in a hushed voice, “I’ve never seen Carrington this bad before.”
“I’m not worried about him right now. I’m worried about you.”
“No need to be.”
“Look, I know you’re a badass, but you don’t have much left. I can see it.”
“It’s a mistake to count me out.”
“I’m not. I’m counting on you. No matter what happens, no matter what I do, your job is to keep Stella safe. Do you understand?”
Hammerton nodded. “What are you thinking, Tom?”
“To get the word to Cahill, I’m going to have to meet with Savelle. Carrington told me that she lives in the city, so if that’s where she wants to meet me, I’ll have to go in alone. I can’t let Stella take any more risks.”
“Tell me what you want me to do.”
“You’ll see it when I make my move. Once I’m gone, take Stella to any Midtown hotel. I don’t want to know which one. If you don’t hear from me by dawn, get out of the city.”
“And then?”
Tom pulled his $1,000 from his pocket and offered it to Hammerton.
“It’s all I have,” he said.
“Keep it, mate. I’ve got money.” Hammerton paused, then said, “I’ll take care of her. You have my word.”
“Thanks.”
Hammerton smiled. “No problem, Seabee.”
Neither said anything for a moment.
The silence was finally broken by Stella.
“I’ve got it.”
Tom approached her as she read from the computer display.
“The deed is listed as being held by Jenna Walewski as trustee of an ‘S.A.R. Trust.’”
“You’re kidding me,” Carrington said.
Tom looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Those are Raveis’s initials. Samuel Arthur Raveis.”
“Why the hell would Raveis try to hide ownership of a property with a land trust that bears his initials? That makes no sense.”
Carrington shrugged. “Got me.”
Tom asked Carrington if he knew anyone named Jenna Walewski, and Carrington replied that he did not.
“The property was purchased six months ago,” Stella said, still reading from the screen. “There’s no lender listed, so it was a cash deal. And the prior owner was Maritime Tool Works Inc. They owned it for close to twenty years. Apparently the building sat on the market for five years before S.A.R. Trust came along and bought it.”
“So no series of holding companies passing it around,” Tom said.
“No.”
Tom addressed the room. “Then why would Savelle say that?”
Carrington said, “If she knew the trust could identify him, she might have said that to dissuade you from bothering to look up the deed. She’s smart, Tom, and she does her homework. She’d know that Stella here had been in real estate and could easily do what she just did.”
“I don’t buy it,” Tom said. “I don’t buy that Raveis would do that. Is he arrogant enough to actually put his initials on the deed to a building that contained an arsenal of military-grade weaponry and munitions?”
“Sam Raveis’s arrogance knows no bounds,” Carrington said.
“But a man doesn’t get and hold on to the power Raveis has by doing stupid things like that,” Hammerton countered.
“The man has a God complex, thinks he’s indestructible and untouchable.” Carrington paused, shrugged, then said, “He isn’t wrong.”
Stella turned from the computer screen and faced the three men.
“Then maybe we can connect Raveis to this S.A.R. Trust through Walewski,” she said. “Maybe Walewski is the trustee to other properties Raveis owns, or would be likely to own. Or maybe she’s an attorney he has worked with before. If we can tie her in some way to Raveis it would at least make it plausible that he’s the actual owner, right? And that would give Tom something to show Cahill.” She looked at Tom. “I could call Joe and ask him to run a background check. It might take him a while, though. He’s off duty right now.”
Tom turned to his former CO and said, “You run background checks all the time, don’t you? And I’m not talking standard checks—I mean illegal surveillance. That was part of your recruiting process, right?”
Carrington was obviously reluctant to admit to Tom that he frequently invaded the privacy of former military members.
Men and women who had served their country and were simply looking for work.
Finally, though, Carrington nodded.
“Then find everything you can on Jenna Walewski,” Tom instructed.
Stella stood and held the seat as Carrington sat down.
Tom glanced at Hammerton.
Though not inebriated like Carrington, Hammerton was nonetheless wavering as well.
Doing his best to hang on, but his best was all used up.
“And please hurry,” Tom said to Carrington. “There isn’t a lot of time.”
Stella placed a cold compress on Hammerton’s forehead.
“He’s running a fever,” she said.
“Bad?” Tom asked.
“Bad enough.”
Tom said that he needed to contact Savelle to set up a meeting as soon as possible.
It was the only way of getting to Cahill.
Stella, of course, reminded Tom that she would be coming with him.
Tom didn’t put up a fight.
But he also couldn’t meet her eyes.
And Hammerton did his part, as promised, said, “I’m coming, too.”
Stepping away, Tom powered up one of the three remaining disposable prepaid phones and entered the number Kevin Montrose had given him.
Then he sent off a three-word text:
Need to meet.
There was nothing for them to do but wait for a reply.
As they did, Hammerton said, “Listen, there’s something I didn’t tell you, Tom. I didn’t really think anything of it at first. He was like that, you know. Compulsive, eager. But I’m thinking that it’s significant now.”
“What is?”
“That night you and Savelle almost burned in that car, when Simpson and I arrived on the scene, he took point.”
“What do you mean?”
“He saw the sedan upside down and on fire—Savelle’s sedan, and the Chechens waiting all around it—and he just rushed right toward it. But that was him, you know—gun-happy, itching for action—so like I said, I didn’t think anything of it.”
“But now?”
Hammerton thought for a moment before saying, “What if it were something else?”
“Like what?”
“What if Simpson wasn’t rushing to carry out Carrington’s orders to protect you? What if he was rushing to save Savelle? What if it was Savelle who told Simpson to pull the firing pin from the Beretta? And had Simpson call Carrington’s phone from his burner so there’d be a record of it—one that Savelle herself would ‘find’ since she seems to be Raveis’s main source of intel? I mean, when they interviewed me back in the farmhouse, she was the one with all the info. Was it that way with you? Did she seem to have all the answers when they were talking to you?”
Tom recalled his conversation in the bunker.
Nearly every piece of information provided to him had come from Savelle.
Maybe even every piece.
And never for one moment did Cahill and Raveis seem to doubt or question her.
In fact, they invariably deferred to her.
“What if Savelle ordered Kadyrov and his men to be waiting for us?” Hammerton said. “Told Kadyrov what to say to you because she was the one who bugged your apartment on Friday? What if she’s the hidden hand behind all this, Tom? Playing Raveis and Cahill and you against one another.”
“That would explain Raveis’s initials being used as the name of the land trust,” Stella said. “Wouldn’t you do that if you wanted to cover your tracks? Implicate someone everyone disliked and distrusted? Do whatever it took to assign your motive to that person?”
Hammerton said, “For that matter, maybe framing Raveis was her original plan.”
“What do you mean?”
“Make it look like Raveis was the one who had Cahill killed. But when Cahill survived the ambush and Raveis had you brought in, she had to come up with a new plan on the fly, decided instead to get you to kill Cahill for her, and in a way that would leave you convinced that Carrington was behind all of it.”
“And if for some reason you dug deep,” Stella said, “the name of the trust would point you to Raveis.”
“She’s scrambling,” Tom said. “Desperate to achieve her goal.”
Hammerton nodded. “Yeah. More like fixated on it, if you ask me. Locked into it, can’t see any other way out.”
“But Savelle would have to know anyone would see Raveis’s initials on a trust and not buy it. Hammerton’s right. A man like Raveis doesn’t get where he is by being stupid.”
“Maybe all Savelle wanted was to create an abundance of confusion,” Stella said. “And maybe she was counting on you being so blinded by rage that you wouldn’t care. Like Cahill is.”
“That would explain Kadyrov taking his time to paint an ugly portrait for you of everything he was planning for Stella,” Hammerton said. “And anyway, whether you bought it or not, Tom—whether you saw Raveis’s initials and jumped to the conclusion she wanted you to jump to, or doubted it and stopped to think it through—the confusion would make a pretty good smoke screen, providing just enough cover for her to get away.”
“But the Chechens ambushed me
and
Savelle,” Tom said. “They tried to kill us. If she had hired them to kill Cahill and his girlfriend—if they worked for her—why would they come after her the very next night?”
Hammerton shrugged, as if the answer were simple.
“To avenge their fallen brothers,” he said. “If any of my SAS mates got killed, I’d seriously consider going after the person responsible. And chances are Savelle didn’t bother to warn them that Cahill was a Recon Marine turned special operator. She might have even outright lied to them about him.”
“It would be easy enough to confirm if they were in fact gang brothers,” Stella said. “The Chechens who attacked Cahill at the motel bore gang tattoos. I’m willing to bet that the ones who attacked you and Savelle had identical tattoos.”
Tom said nothing.
In his mind, he pictured Savelle and Cahill standing next to each other in the bunker.
He saw, too, the smile on Savelle’s face when he joined them in the bunker’s makeshift conference room.
And the look of gratitude she had displayed as she leaned, her face stained with smoke, against the bumper of Hammerton’s SUV.
Tom was thinking of all these moments when the phone in his hand rang.
All eyes went to it.
Tom saw a reply text on the display.
It contained a New York City address, just as Carrington had said it would.
The only instructions the text included were precisely where Tom should wait at that location and that he would need to be there by ten.
Just a little under three hours away.
Which was exactly how long it would have taken Tom to make the drive from Canaan to New York City.
Tom memorized the address, then deleted the text.
There was, now more than ever, no way in hell that he would allow Stella to come with him.
Nor was there any way in hell that he was going let Stella know where he was headed.
“It’s her?” Stella said.
Tom nodded.
The fact that Savelle hadn’t needed confirmation of the sender’s identity told Tom that she had only given him that number.
It also told him that Savelle, as Hammerton had suggested, was capable of thinking moves ahead.
More than capable, in fact.
An expert at it.
But all this simply brought them right back to the same predicament as before.
They needed definitive proof.
Something to show Cahill that would cause him to end his war, or at least call a cease-fire.
From behind Tom, Carrington spoke.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Jesus Christ.”
All eyes now turned to him.
“What?” Tom said.
“There are several Jenna Walewskis, believe it or not, but one stands out. KIA in Iraq seven years ago. A Humvee driver. Her vehicle was taken out by an IED. Riding with Walewski was her platoon leader. A lieutenant fresh out of West Point. Anyone care to guess her name?”
No one needed to.
“Alexa Savelle.” Carrington spoke as he skimmed a newspaper article. “Wounded, fought off an ambush, saved a whole bunch of lives. Bronze Star, honorably discharged.” He paused before concluding, “Returns home a war hero.”
“A war hero who fucking steals a dead solder’s identity,” Hammerton said. “One of her own, too.”
“And uses it to appoint a ghost as trustee,” Stella added. “This explains why she didn’t want you looking up the deed, Tom. That bullshit comment of hers about holding companies . . . she knew that a couple of computer key strokes by the right person and up comes Walewski’s name. A few more keystrokes and, boom, there’s a direct link between the two of them. And from there everything would start to fall apart fast.”
Tom turned back to Carrington. “Do me a favor, pull up the train schedule.”
“You’re not still thinking about meeting with her?” Stella said.
“We need Cahill to know. Not only that Carrington had nothing to do with this, but that a person he trusts—one of the two people with access to him—is the one who betrayed him. The only way I can get to Cahill is through Savelle. And Savelle won’t talk over the phone, so I need to meet her face-to-face.”
“She also tried to have you killed, Tom. What’s to stop her from trying again?”
“She has no idea what I know.”
“You can’t be sure of that. You can’t be sure of anything right now.”
“It has to be this way, Stella. I just need to get to Cahill tonight. I need to tip him off. And then all this will be over for us.”
“Can’t you talk to Raveis? You said two people had access to Cahill. He’s the other one, right? I’m sure he’d be interested to know that Savelle tried to set him up. Better Raveis take care of this, Tom, than you go running off on another mission to rescue Cahill.”
Tom shook his head. “I still don’t trust Raveis. It has to be this way. I have to do this. And anyway, we’re running out of time.”
“What do you mean?”